by Bob Stanley
Happy Mondays had signed to Factory in 1985. They looked like drug dealers from a run-down Manchester estate because that’s exactly what they were. Their music always seemed to be on the point of collapse, drums galloped ahead of their strange cowboy-funk guitar sound, and singer Shaun Ryder’s barked lyrics were often incomprehensible: ‘You don’t like that face because the bones stick out’. Interviewed, Ryder confessed that they were trying to sound like the Rolling Stones, but their lack of musical ability meant they ended up sounding very much their own invention. ‘Freaky Dancin’’, their first truly inspired record, came out in 1987 as Ryder and his hooded cohorts, now in flares, discovered E and loosened up. ‘When we first had E,’ said Ryder, ‘there couldn’t have been more than a dozen of us in our corner of the Haçienda. No one had a clue. We had the end of ’87 to ourselves.’ Martin Hannett was brought in to produce their second album, 1988’s Bummed, which featured a garish acid-dream painting of Ryder’s face on its sleeve. Hannett gave them space and density, made sense of their loping groove and basic tunelessness. The album crossed the great divide between guitars and electronic pulse beats and, with a club-friendly mix of ‘Wrote for Luck’ by Paul Oakenfold in ’88, Happy Mondays became the first group to unite indie students and house-loving clubbers.
Happy Mondays’ biggest fans were a former goth rock band called the Stone Roses, who were mainly known in Manchester for spray-painting their name across some of the city’s most beloved buildings and monuments in 1985. Melodically, they were C86-inspired, but John Squire was far better than the stereotypical indie guitarist. Initially, the Stone Roses had little to do with the dance scene at all, save for playing in warehouses around Manchester; still, when their first album was released in May ’89 it was the hallucinogenic ending to ‘This Is the One’, the rush of backwards noise on ‘Don’t Stop’ and the extended rave-up ‘I Am the Resurrection’ – which built, dropped and surged over nine minutes exactly like a house record – that drew people in. In February ’89 they had played to thirty-odd people at the Seven Sisters campus of Middlesex Polytechnic; by the time the loping ‘Fools Gold’ (UK no. 8 ’89), based on a loop from James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’, came out in November they were the biggest group in Britain and drew eight thousand people to Alexandra Palace, a far bigger crowd than the Smiths had ever played to.
People had been pining for the Smiths since they split in ’87 and trying to find enjoyment in Morrissey’s Smith-lite solo records. Between them, the Roses and the Mondays made the Smiths obsolete. The exact point at which this happened was at 7.30 p.m. on November 23rd 1989, when they both appeared on Top of the Pops, playing ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Fools Gold’. A week earlier, 808 State had played ‘Pacific State’ on the show. Happy Mondays came up with the phrase ‘Madchester’4 to sum up the unlikely annexation of British TV by these bowl-cutted northerners in shapeless rave-wear; the British music press tagged the scene ‘baggy’, and it stuck.
By the end of ’89, with the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and 808 State sharing Top 40 space with Chicago house and Detroit techno, there were queues around the block to get into the Haçienda three hours before it opened. The crowd was largely made up of white students.5 Some, including future Chemical Brothers Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, brought sandwiches and made an event of the long wait. Eventually a fanzine called Freaky Dancing was made by the queue and for the queue, in an attempt to share and explain the excitement. When the Haçienda closed, after-hours clubs proliferated in the brutalist crescents of the nearby Hulme housing estate. If you wanted a seven-day weekend, here it was.
Also in the charts of 1989 were a Sheffield father-and-son team called Jive Bunny who, cloth-eared and glassy-eyed, were fighting a desperate rearguard action against the new music, hanging onto the past just as David Whitfield and Dickie Valentine had done in the face of the mid-fifties rock ’n’ roll boom. Jive Bunny scored three straight number ones – ‘Swing the Mood’, ‘That’s What I Like’, ‘Let’s Party’ – with cloddish cut-and-paste medleys of Bill Haley, Chubby Checker and the Hawaii Five-0 theme. A sickly cartoon rabbit, one that you wouldn’t allow near your kids, was the music’s physical representation.
Meanwhile, bursting out of cellars and into warehouses across the country was an Italian record called ‘Grand Piano’ by the Mixmaster, which cut up Ralph Rosario’s ‘You Used to Hold Me’, Coldcut and Lisa Stansfield’s ‘People Hold On’, Kaos’s ‘Definition of Love’ and Tyree’s ‘Turn Up the Bass’. ‘Grand Piano’ used the same principle as Jive Bunny but headed in the exact opposite direction: the sampled songs were largely unfamiliar, they were used creatively – they were set to soundtrack your tomorrow. Italian house provided several of 1989’s most jubilant singles: Starlight’s ‘Numero Uno’ (UK no. 8), Gino Latino’s ‘Welcome’ (UK no. 17) and FPI Project’s ‘Going Back to My Roots’ (UK no. 5), essentially a monotonous backing track of the old Odyssey/Lamont/Dozier hit, but with irresistible house-piano chords that gave it an extraordinary warmth. A further cut-and-paste Italian job, Black Box’s ‘Ride on Time’6 was everywhere in the summer of ’89, a phenomenon, number one for six weeks. Jive Bunny could be easily ignored. As the door to the nineties opened, here was a modern pop revolution which could be traced back to a malfunctioning machine rather than a musician – the accidental, idiot joy of the Roland 303.
Three unexpected things happened in the wake of acid house. Firstly, it invigorated indie. In the wake of the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, other groups adapted to a more groove-led production. There was a second wave of Manchester acts – neither Inspiral Carpets nor the Charlatans had to reconfigure their sixties, organ-based sound too much to fit in perfectly, and the latter’s ‘The Only One I Know’ (UK no. 9 ’90) has been an indie disco staple ever since. The Soup Dragons and Primal Scream, two Glasgow groups who had both featured on the C86 compilation, were more radically reinvented – the former with a desperate baggy cover of the Rolling Stones’ ‘I’m Free’ (no. 5 ’90) featuring an ill-advised ragga break, the latter with the rather more cosmic Screamadelica. In the long term, groups began to take their own DJs on tour to warm up the crowd, rather than relying on the sound man’s CD collection.7
Secondly, it opened Britain up to European dance music, because lyrics didn’t really matter. Italian house was just the beginning. The introduction of £1 ferry deals at the end of the eighties meant that people could now afford to go from Hull to Amsterdam and sample European clubbing. Some returned with a taste for the Lowlands’ harder, darker techno variant which quickly became part of the outdoor rave scene – Joey Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’, T 99’s ‘Anasthasia’ (no. 14 ’91) – while the new brand of European post-techno pop made regular incursions into the chart: 2 Unlimited (‘Get Ready for This’, ‘Twilight Zone’, ‘No Limit’), Haddaway (‘What Is Love’, ‘Life’, ‘Rock My Heart’) and Capella (‘U Got 2 Know’, ‘U Got 2 Let the Music’, ‘Move On Baby’) became Top 10 fixtures. Livin’ Joy’s ‘Dreamer’, an Italian-made house record that reached number one when it was reissued in ’96, had a lyric that defied analysis: ‘Here we lie all alone, am I dreaming? Your heart’s smooth, my soul is unbelieving. Now you see the me and I’m a-feeling, I’m a-feeling.’ When Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ had been number one in 1977 the lyrics and Spanish accents were a national event, fodder for stand-up comedians for the next five years. I don’t recall a single note of dissent about Livin’ Joy’s violation of the English language; the atmosphere of the record, the intensity of the vocal and its minor-chord uplift meant no one really cared. It just felt right.
Acid house also woke up the British soul scene, partly as a backlash to dayglo bagginess. Haçienda DJ Mike Pickering started a group called M People with Muppet-voiced singer Heather Small and captured – presumably unintentionally – a post-rave wine-bar crowd, the same contingent who would have bought Paul Young records a decade earlier. M People had scored ten flavourless Top 10 hits by the late nineties. More intriguing were a pair of
labels – Acid Jazz and DJ Norman Jay’s Talkin’ Loud – which were similarly touched by acid’s liberation yet, clearly of the belief that there had been worthwhile records made in the olden days, were rooted in seventies funk and soul. Even with a single as loose and memorable as the Young Disciples’ ‘Apparently Nothin’’ (UK no. 13 ’91) it felt a little like you were partying in a library.8
It wasn’t just the older soul fraternity who felt the need to slow things down. For many early adopters, the intensity of Ibiza and acid house had begun to give way to a desire for something more mellow by 1989. This coincided with the overground emergence of a North London DJ/club/shop/sound-system hire collective called Soul II Soul who had released the midtempo beauty ‘Keep On Movin’’ (UK no. 5 ’89) in the spring. Mixing soul and lovers’ rock, its soft, tactile vocal from Caron Wheeler was backed by house-piano riffs played at quarter speed, Jazzie B’s daydreaming lyric – which had an obsession with the weather that recalled Noël Coward or Ray Davies – and, most importantly, a distinctive, rolling, 98 bpm loop taken from Graham Central Station’s funk track ‘The Jam’; with ‘Keep On Movin’’, it felt as if Soul II Soul had tapped into the exact velocity of MDMA.9 They revisited the loop for ‘Back to Life’ in the summer of ’89 and this time scored a UK number one. By the year’s end the 98 bpm Soul II Soul rhythm was all over a bunch of midtempo records that found a ready audience in post-acid Ibiza, where people wanted something that felt and sounded like the sun rising: One World’s ‘Down on Love’ and the Family Stand’s ‘Ghetto Heaven’ (UK no. 10 ’90) were built on Soul II Soul’s spiritual feel; from Italy came J. T. and the Big Family’s ‘Moments in Soul’ (UK no. 7 ’90); from St Albans came the Grid’s ‘Floatation’, which celebrated the raver’s favoured non-chemical method of relaxation. A bootleg of US folkie Edie Brickell’s ‘What I Am’ emerged with the Soul II Soul beat planted underneath it,10 and – with all snob barriers down – DJs even found room for such unlikely, but rhythmically perfect, dancefloor material as Chris Rea’s ‘Josephine’ and Mr Mister’s AOR ballad ‘Broken Wings’. Summing up the whole scene was ‘Joy and Heartbreak’ by Movement 98, a pseudonym for one of the Ibiza pioneers, Paul Oakenfold. ‘We’d come through E, and what we were into was smoking joints and chilling. For me, at the raves it was all sheep. Everyone would look the same, dress the same … it was full of younger people.’
By 1990 Oakenfold and his erstwhile Ibiza revolutionaries were bemoaning the influx of youngsters with their white gloves, white tracksuits and glow sticks. They came across exactly like ’76 punks, moaning about how the scene had been wrecked by ‘acid teds … groping E-heads who don’t know how to handle drugs properly’. But unlike the ’76 punks, they also realised the various futures this fervent scene was opening up. In the summer of 1991 DJ Andy Weatherall and Primal Scream created ‘Higher than the Sun’, which somehow blended Bobby Gillespie’s vaporous vocal, dub thunderclaps and distorted harpsichord to create a modern psychedelia. Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds acted as rave’s own Leonard Bernstein, an observer from the beached and increasingly irrelevant indie scene who was seized by enthusiasm for the new music and accordingly wanted to share his love with more cynical contemporaries. Reviewing ‘Higher than the Sun’, he called it ‘ahead of the times, at once new and timeless … octopoid tentacles of gooey bliss, freak-out guitar, adding up to an inspired, inspirational mess. Space rock/acid dub/cosmic house – all of these and none of them apply.’
Things had evolved dramatically since ‘Acid Tracks’, just two years earlier. You could understand why first-wave, knackered ravers were retiring to Ibiza, opening bars where they could chill out and listen to ‘Higher than the Sun’ on a loop, a 98 bpm mix all day long, leaving London to the groping, hapless acid Teds. You could understand, but they really missed a treat.
As for the conservatives at Radio 1 and their stated desire to appeal to executives and theatregoers, the tide had turned against them in the first week of October 1989, when the Top 3 was made up of Black Box’s ‘Ride on Time’ (which ended up as the biggest-selling single of the year), Belgian act Technotronic’s bouncy but stripped-back ‘Pump Up the Jam’ (or ‘pormp orp the jam’) and Sydney Youngblood’s ‘If Only I Could’, R&B with a tough but tender vocal that recalled early-sixties strongmen like Jerry Butler and Chuck Jackson. Bros, Billy Joel, Aerosmith and Deacon Blue were all hovering lower down the Top 40, but who cared about the rest of the chart? The nineties couldn’t wait to begin.
1 Amnesia had been run by an Argentinian DJ called Alfredo since 1984. He became obsessed with Chicago’s DJ International and Trax labels – Adonis’s ‘No Way Back’ was his all-time favourite – but he always played an adventurous mixture. His summer 1987 mix included the Woodentops’ rattling indie single ‘Well Well Well’ and Art of Noise’s dreamy, dead slow, and virtually undanceable ‘Moments in Love’.
2 The post-house pop revolution would bring to the fore dozens of people who had been around in the post-punk era but seemed to have sat out the eighties, either through lack of opportunity or boredom, or both: Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk recorded as Sweet Exorcist for Warp; new-wave pranksters Freur re-emerged as Underworld; Soft Cell’s Dave Ball was half of the Grid; If?, who had a major club hit with ‘Saturday’s Angels’, were ex-members of Subway Sect; the Guerilla label was formed by former anarchist squatter William Orbit and Dick O’Dell, former manager of the Pop Group; Kiss FM and Rage DJ Colin Faver had worked for Small Wonder in Walthamstow.
3 The exception was Blackpool group Section 25, who, with two drummers and melodic, upfront basslines, took a singular route between PiL, Manchester miserabilism and emergent electronica: ‘The Beast’, ‘Looking from a Hilltop’ and ‘Friendly Fires’ straddle Factory’s two peak periods.
4 T-shirts emblazoned with the name trailed Happy Mondays’ Madchester Rave On EP by a few weeks, presumably manufactured by the group’s mates. Shaun Ryder’s self-contradictory memory is that ‘It was our video directors, the Bailey Brothers, who came up with the term “Madchester”, but we said, “Great, yeah, go with it,” because Manchester was mad at the time. But no one used the term in Manchester, unless they were a prick.’
5 The previous Christmas, John Peel’s Festive Fifty, a reasonable measure of student tastes, had included nothing close to house or techno, but multiple entries for the House of Love (whose ‘Destroy the Heart’ was number one), the Wedding Present, Pixies, My Bloody Valentine and the Fall.
6 An Italian DJ called Daniele Davoli was behind ‘Ride on Time’, which was basically a remix of Loleatta Holloway’s 1980 single ‘Love Sensation’. Davoli was also behind the Mixmaster’s ‘Grand Piano’ and Starlight’s ‘Numero Uno’, as well as ‘Airport ’89’ under the pseudonym Wood Allen. ‘I like Woody Allen,’ explained Davoli.
7 Working for Inspiral Carpets became an unlikely nineties nursery: they took the future ‘superstar DJ’ Paul van Dyk on tour with them in ’91, and gave a young Noel Gallagher his first break as a roadie.
8 Has there ever been a more symbolic group name than the Young Disciples? We are young, we know our place, but we understand our heritage.
9 The tempo of ‘Keep On Movin’’ is close to that of the Cure’s ‘All Cats Are Grey’, which may help to explain Marc Almond’s epiphany.
10 This predated the bootleg/mash-up trend of ten years later, which culminated in the Sugababes’ number one ‘Freak Like Me’, a mix of an Adina Howard vocal line with the backing track from Tubeway Army’s ‘Are “Friends” Electric’.
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1991: TIME FOR THE MU MU
In August 1990 Factory Records’ Tony Wilson was asked to host a talk at CMJ, an annual industry get-together in New York. His panel was called ‘Wake Up America, You’re Dead!’ and on it were Happy Mondays’ manager Nathan McGough and comedian Keith Allen, plus Chicago’s Marshall Jefferson and Detroit’s Derrick May. Wilson reckoned that the major labels had been ‘shitting themselves for the last twelve months because they’v
e invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in groups which they could no longer sell … the point is, kids in Britain for the last few years and still today and tomorrow are having the times of their lives, in the words of the Dirty Dancing movie. I don’t see any kids in America having the time of their lives.’
This wasn’t quite true, but British and American pop culture seemed a long, long way apart. Rock and hip hop were still dominant in the States. Hard rock was going through a metamorphosis as the Sunset Strip glam-metal bands began to seem tired, and too prone to soppy ballads for Led Zep lovers: 1988 had seen the release of two albums that toughened up rock and made it seem dangerous and viable again, Metallica’s … And Justice for All and Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction.1 Both groups referenced punk as an influence, both helped to create an audience for the alternative stadium rock of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More and Jane’s Addiction.
